The reviewers on Yelp — where everyone is a critic with up to five stars to bestow or withhold — were not complaining about the usual staples: an overcooked steak, or poor service, or a botched pedicure. They were writing about a woman named Samantha, whose business on East 59th Street is more personal in nature. She is a psychic.

Yelp reviews of psychics apply a modern lens to an age-old practice. People have claimed for centuries to have psychic powers, and their methods — and, for some, their schemes — have not changed appreciably over time. Nor has a business model that has gotten by on word of mouth and storefronts and signage that seem exotic.

But times have changed. A psychic on East 37th Street in Midtown Manhattan, one Yelp reviewer wrote last year, “begged me to write nice reviews so she can get more clients.” When the reviewer posted negative comments instead, she wrote, “she begged me to take them down.”

A psychic on Bleecker Street, who gave her name only as Alice and who had been well reviewed on Yelp (“Absolutely an awesome clairvoyant!”) said last week that she was nonetheless distrustful of customers who were drawn to her after reading online reviews.

“They have delusions of grandeur,” she said. “They say, ‘If I don’t like my reading, I’m going to give you a bad review.’”

Several New York psychics have been reviewed by the same person, Vinny Pinto, 65, a clairvoyant connoisseur of sorts who lives in Maryland and visits the city several times a year. A self-described “mystic, spiritual healer and spiritual guide,” Mr. Pinto seeks tarot card readings and turns to Yelp to pass judgment.

“Hopefully they may eventually be of some use to someone,” he said recently of his reviews.

In August 2013, Mr. Pinto visited a psychic on West 43rd Street who called herself Cristina. “Cristina did try an upsell attempt,” he wrote on Yelp. “She told me that my aura was full of negative energy, and offered to clean it for an additional fee of $450, which I politely but firmly declined.”

Alas, he did not post the review in time to help another man who entered the same shop two weeks later and began what became more than a year of visits during which he paid Cristina, whose real name was Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, more than $550,000 to clean evil spirits from his past and reunite him with a dead woman.

Mr. Pinto wondered whether any review was likely to reach its target audience — those about to enter a psychic’s parlor for the first time.

“A lot of people who walk into a psychic do not have access to the Internet and are not on Yelp,” he said. “Let’s be honest. Most of them just walk right in because it’s an impulse thing.”

Tiffany B. wrote that her friend had visited the psychic Samantha on an impulse and in distress. “Samantha,” Tiffany B. wrote in December, “told her she needs a weeklong cleansing to clear the negativity between her and her boyfriend,” dropping her price from $700 to “a mere $300.”

When the boyfriend suddenly appeared at the parlor, Samantha took credit, claiming, Tiffany B. wrote, “the crystals in her shop guided him to where she was, rather than me texting him her location so she didn’t end up as the newest episode headline of ‘Law and Order: SVU,’ while she wanders her little, southern behind all over NYC alone at night.”

Tiffany B., who has also reviewed an optometrist (five stars) and a Moroccan restaurant (five stars, now closed), gave Samantha one star.

A psychic’s parlor on Horatio Street in the West Village also received unkind reviews — “so vague and extremely incorrect” — but Ronnie Reese, 53, a fortuneteller who has been there for 25 years, said that she had not read them and that they did not affect her business.

She does not advertise online. “I’ve never really had to,” she said. “Everybody knows me.”

Ms. Reese said the negative reviews were not about her — other women do readings in the shop sometimes. One of those women was arrested in 2011 and charged with grand larceny in connection with her fortunetelling. Ms. Reese shrugged that off as old news and an aberration at her parlor.

Samantha, the subject of Tiffany B.’s review, also seemed to be doing fine, having relocated. She answered her phone on Friday and said she was in the middle of a reading. Elsewhere, in Midtown, at least two psychics with pending criminal cases were apparently back at work last week. The police and one-star Yelp reviews come and go, but the allure of a peek into the future or a chance to cleanse the past would appear to be arrest-proof and critic-proof.

As Ms. Reese said, looking out the broad window of a parlor that has been around since long before Yelp, “Everything stays the same.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Tarot Cards in the Age of Yelp: What Psychics See in Those Stars. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe